“Many people hang up on voice mail because they know in the majority of cases that no one will call them back. If one is trying to get new customers and has a machine all they have to do is count the “clicks” (hang-ups) to know how many calls and sales opportunities they missed.”
Remember back when you would call someplace and get a real live operator? You know, the good old days, when you could speak to a live person, even if it wasn’t the one for whom you were calling? The twenty first century has brought us a huge boom in technology, some of it great and wonderful, some of it not so much. One of the digital generation’s greatest faux pas, by far, is the advent of the voice activated menu. I’d rather reach a phone answering service. At least then, I KNOW someone is getting the message. I know someone is hearing me. An answering service for small business is a group of highly trained, qualified professionals who do nothing but provide telephone answering services. That’s it. That’s all they do, day and night, every day. Companies providing business phone answering services have gathered and honed the skills of hundreds of operators who know what they’re doing. Gone are the days of: “To hear this menu in English, press one, Para escuchar este menú en español, presione el número dos.” There’s no longer a need to sit with the phone pressed to your ear for half an hour waiting on hold just to be thrown into another queue, or worse yet, to be suddenly asked by a top of the line TI-82 to leave a message after the beep. A phone answering service connects you to a real live person, who will take your message down verbatim, and deliver it to the appropriate person at the very nearest opportunity. There’s no waiting, no pacing the room with the phone pressed to your ear, no switching arms as one, then the other, goes numb. If the person you are trying to reach is unavailable, the phone answering service is. As an added bonus, a phone answering service for small business NEVER makes you wait an hour to reroute you to a machine that will tell you “the inbox for the person you are calling is full, please try again later. Goodbye. (click).” THAT is infuriating!
But a machine guarantees my message will be heard exactly as I said it.
Does it? Are you sure about that? One of the major disadvantages of a machine is that you can never be certain if it’s working properly. We all know that sometimes it isn’t. What if you’re calling a doctor’s office and you’re distraught because you’re uncertain whether or not you have an emergency? Wouldn’t you rather reach a telephone answering service that could clearly understand you, even ask questions to obtain more information, and if need be, contact that doctor immediately? Or let’s say you’re calling a purveyor for your business, and you need a question about your order answered by noon the next day. Can you be certain a machine or inbox will be checked in time for your message to be delivered? A business phone answering service can. Or, maybe you speak Spanish, and your English is a bit rusty. Phone answering services, more often than not, have bilingual operators available. There’s no guarantee that the person playing your message from a machine understands Spanish. There’s not even a guarantee that they’ll check their messages. An answering service for small business will hand deliver your message directly to the person for whom it’s intended.
